TheEnglishSurgeon Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The best movie scores don't just add extra depth to a movie, but they take on lives on their own; they sneak into your subconscious so that the next time you hear Nino Rota you feel like downing some espressos and dancing in the Trevi Fountain.

Post-punk/death rocker turned mustachioed Southern Gothic philosopher Nick Cave and his fellow Bad Seed bandmate Warren Ellis* have become standout film composers in the past few years, beginning with their collaboration on The Proposition, a Western from the land Down Under directed by The Road's John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave. They also created the soundscape for the sadly underseen and somewhat overlong The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their most recent collaboration on the score for The Road is worthy of an Oscar nomination -- subtle, appropriately dark but not overbearing, and elegant.

However, the two have also written scores for other, lesser-known movies like the documentary The Girls of Phnom Penh, about young Cambodian sex workers, and The English Surgeon, a doc about a brain doc who regularly travels to the Ukraine to perform surgery on the poor, sick, and often desperate.

White Lunar is an upcoming 2-disc compilation of these scores, along with a few extra bits from the vaults:

Each June, the American Film Institute convenes the Silverdocs Film Festival (they like to spell it in all caps, SILVERDOCS) in the Washington, DC suburbs. The festival, presented in partnership with the Discovery Channel, is actually a full-blown documentary conference, and it gives out sizable cash prizes to the winners of its awards. Cinematical missed the fest this year (though we did manage to notice their interesting choice to honor Spike Lee), but we figured we'd tell you about the results.

The grand prize for a US feature -- a handsome ten grand plus a lot of expensive film stock from Kodak -- went to Scott Hamilton Kennedy (2002's OT: Our Town) for The Garden. The movie told the story of the South Central Farm -- a 14-acre community garden that sprung up at the site of the 1992 LA Riots. Kennedy chronicles the farmers' battle with landlords, the city of Los Angeles, and the courts.